


First Ride

by nightwalker



Category: Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Backstory, Canon - Comics, Captain Marvel - Freeform, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 14:58:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5971171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwalker/pseuds/nightwalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her first car is a 89 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. It’s not new, but it’s in good shape and it should last her for a few years. More importantly, she doesn't need to ask her father to buy it for her. Soon, she won't need to ask her father for anything ever again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Ride

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt from post-and-out

Her first car is a 89 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. It’s not new, but it’s in good shape and it should last her for a few years. More importantly, the older woman selling it has it priced to move which means Carol doesn’t need to ask her father for a loan. 

Soon she’s not going to have to ask her father for _anything_.

The car is dark red, almost maroon, and the interior is almost the same shade. The radio looks brand-new and the car is spotlessly clean. The tires are a little worn, but they’ll last her at least a year. She’ll need to replace the windshield wipers and the air filter, and the oil is overdue to be changed, but that’s all work she can do herself. 

She runs her hand over the hood while the seller goes back into the house to get the title. She’ll have to hide the car for a few days, but that should be easy enough. If she parks it a couple of blocks away her father will never suspect. The hard part will be smuggling her things out without anyone noticing.

Six days.

In six days she’ll be eighteen. No one can stop her from leaving then. 

The seller comes back out. She’s a tiny thing - barely five feet tall with hair died a vivid red. She’s wearing a lilac jogging suit and she’s told Carol a dozen stories about her three grandchildren who live in New Jersey. “All yours, honey.” 

She hands over the title and Carol hands her the envelope full of hundred dollar bills. It’s almost the entirety of her life savings, every penny she’s saved over the last year since finding out that she’d have to make her own plans if she wanted to go to college. She has enough left for gas, a hotel and a few meals. After that…

Well. JBSA-Lackland has cadet housing and a mess hall. It would be a while before Carol could go off base, that’s all.

She was going to get an education. She was going to get a job that didn’t require her to smile prettily and flirt with every old man who came into the store.

She was going to _fly_. 

Carol patted the hood of the car one last time before she opened the door and slid behind the wheel. The Air Force. Her Master’s degree. One day: _NASA_.

She still has the same car more than ten years later when the Air Force makes her a full-bird colonel, when NASA calls her, when she meets MarVell.

It’s destroyed by Iron Man during the attack at the Cape. She doesn’t know this for weeks as she recovers from her encounter with the Psyche-Magnitron. 

(When they finally let her out, Tony Stark is there sheepish and apologetic and Carol wonders how the hell no one has figured Iron Man’s secret identity out yet)

“I can replace it,” he offers. “I’m sure I can find another one - or rebuild yours. It might take a little while to find original parts, but we could make it good as new.”

Carol’s car was last seen flat as a pancake in the NASA employee lot. Large portions of it had been melted into slag. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like the attack was Iron Man’s fault.”

“Well, it’s not your fault either,” Stark points out with a cheerful sort of benevolence that Carol has no way of knowing she’ll one day be intimately familiar with. “Look, I know the Air Force doesn’t pay you that much-”

“I,” Carol says with a great deal of relish, “am a full-bird colonel with astronaut training and _super powers_.”

She knows her smile is slightly manic. Stark throws his head back and laughs.

“I like you,” he says. “Forget about the Oldsmobile. I’ll owe you one. Call me when you’re ready to cash it in.”

She mostly forgets about it over the next few weeks as she finds out that NASA appreciates super powers far less than she’d anticipated. She ends up in Chicago, demoted and making exactly as little pay as Stark had assumed she did. She’s angry and a little bitter and if NASA wants to burn her for something that was done to her in the line of duty she can burn them right back.

Stark calls her back in less than twenty-four hours. “A publishing deal?” he says on her answering machine. “Danvers, any jackass can get published.”

He doesn’t call back after that, but the contract comes in the mail three days later, a fat stack of papers promising Carol Danvers a hefty advance for an as-yet-undetermined book of to-be-determined content and length with full media exposure.

There’s a small white envelope taped to the front of the contract. When Carol opens it a car key falls out into her palm.

She looks at it for a minute, then marches downstairs to stare at the maroon 89 Oldsmobile parked in front of her building.

She curls her fingers around the key and for the first time in weeks - for the first time since that day at the Cape when she’d shared a smile with Tony Stark over her brand-new super powers - Carol smiles.


End file.
